Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In language comprehension, mental representations of temporal relations between described situations are often construed by inference. While the basis for these inferences remains unclear, growing evidence suggests that abstract predicate properties – such as dynamicity and causal structure – play a crucial role in temporal event construal. Across two self-paced reading experiments, replicating and extending Gennari (2004), we find that temporal proximity inferences are shaped by these properties, but only for stative predicates that generally encode non-dynamic situations without causal structure: Participants consistently expected states to overlap in time, in both complement (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that temporal proximity inferences arise as a general feature of (non)-dynamicity, supporting models of language comprehension that prioritize abstract event structural properties in shaping temporal inferences.